Exuberance by Kay Redfield Jamison

Author:Kay Redfield Jamison [Jamison, Kay Redfield]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4374-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2004-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

We are beholden to the human side and enthusiasm of scientists; their passion in the pursuit of reason is heady and requisite stuff indeed.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Nothing Is Too Wonderful to Be True”

(photo credit 8.1)

Richard Feynman depressed, observed a colleague, was “just a little more cheerful than any other person when exuberant.” He was, as well, a preternaturally original thinker, irrepressibly curious, and one of the great teachers in the history of science. For me, Feynman’s legendary brilliance as a teacher is his most remarkable legacy, but then I am prejudiced. My grandmother, mother, aunt, and sister were teachers, and almost everyone else in the family—my grandfather, my father, an aunt, a great-uncle, a nephew, three cousins, my brother, and I—are, or were, professors. To teach well, I heard early and often, is to make a difference. To teach unusually well is to create magic.

It is a magic often rooted in exuberance. Great teachers infect others with their delight in ideas, and such joy, as we have seen—whether it is sparked by teaching or through play, by music, or during the course of an experiment—alerts and intensifies the brain, making it a more teeming and generative place. Intense emotion also makes it more likely that experience will be etched into memory.

Horror certainly does. We remember with too much clarity where we were and what we were doing when we first saw the hijacked planes fly into the World Trade Center and then, minutes later, as yet another crashed into the outer wall of the Pentagon. No one who saw this will forget. But joy, differently, also registers. We recollect moments of great pleasure and discovery—watching on a remarkable July night as the spider-legged lunar module dropped onto the moon’s surface, for instance, or listening for the first time to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis; falling in love; playing through the long evenings of childhood summers—for nature has supplied us with the means to absorb the essential and to recall the critical. Teachers are among the earliest and most powerful of these means of knowing.

To teach is to show, and to show persuasively demands an active and enthusiastic guide. This must always have been so. Emotional disengagement in the ancient world would have been catastrophic if the young were to learn how to hunt, how to plant, and how to track the stars. The stakes were high: to motivate their wards would have been requisite for the first teachers—the parents and shamans, the priests and the tribal elders. Passing on knowledge about the behavior of the natural world from the emerging sciences of astronomy, agriculture, and medicine would have been among a society’s first priorities. The great natural scientists, such as Hippocrates and Aristotle, Lucretius and Hipparchus, not only studied the ways of man and of the heavens but also taught what they knew to others. In turn, a few of those whom they taught observed the world in their own and slightly different ways, added to the stock of what was known, created a new understanding, and passed it on.

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